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Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.

John Updike

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John Updike
Age: 76 †
Born: 1932
Born: March 18
Died: 2009
Died: January 27
Art Critic
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
John Hoyer Updike
Audience
Opera
Operas
Stills
Encouragement
Strips
Doe
Magazines
Instruct
Still
Genre
Amuse
Government
Comic
Genres
Never
Created
Soap
Hold
Funding
Hear
Preservation
Girlie

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The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
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To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
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All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
John Updike
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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.
John Updike
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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John Updike
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
John Updike
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
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Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
John Updike
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An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
John Updike
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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
John Updike